Liberalism's Sacred Cow

Homi K. Bhabha
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Liberals have a way of occupying the high moral ground while keeping the
lower depths finely covered, moving convincingly from "causes" to cases, balancing
theory and practice. What are the possibilities of maneuver in the midst of
such fluency? I welcome Susan Okin's central argument that "there is considerable
likelihood of conflict between feminism and group rights for minority cultures,
which persists even when the latter are claimed on liberal grounds." This
is a useful corrective to the prevailing orthodoxy that establishes "equivalences"
between disadvantaged groups, aggregating "communities of interest" without
doing the hard work of specifying rights and interests, shying away from conflicts
within, and between, minorities.

Let me, however, tweak the sacred cow by the tail (rather than indulging
in the phallic fandango of taking the bull by the horn) and suggest
that the force of Okin's feminist advocacy rests on a restricted understanding
of the "liberal grounds" on which feminism and multiculturalism might negotiate
their differences about rights and representations. Okin's view of the interface
between feminism and multiculturalism is so focused on the "conflict" generated
by the anti-feminist and patriarchal effects of criminal cultural defense
that, against her own best advice, she allows herself to produce "monolithic,"
though gender-differentiated, characterizations of minority, migrant cultures--kidnap
and rape by Hmong men, wife-murder by immigrants from Asia and the Middle
Eastern countries, mother-child suicide among Japanese and Chinese provoked
by the shame of the husband's infidelity.

The cultural defense plea is the ethnographic evidence that, for Okin, invokes
the "basic idea" that the defendant's cultural group regards women as subordinates
whose primary purpose is to serve men sexually and domestically. By contrast,
"Western liberal cultures" (a phrase Okin repeatedly uses to identify which
side she is on) may discriminate between the sexes in practice, but the protection
of domestic law produces an enabling and equitable familial culture for girls
and women. Writing as I am from London, the British experience is most readily
to hand. The British civil liberty group Liberty would demur from Okin's
description of the egalitarian and empowering "Western" domestic scene. Human
Rights and Wrongs, an alternative report to the UN Human Rights Committee,
concludes that one-third of all reported crimes against women in Britain result
from domestic violence and take place at home; in London, in 1993, one woman
in ten had been assaulted by her partner. Adult women and children are overwhelmingly
more likely to become the victims of violence at home than on the street or
at the workplace.

But I am, here, less concerned with the domestic perspective than with the
more global cultural assumptions that animate Okin's arguments. Her narrative
begins by pitting multiculturalism against feminism, but then grows seamlessly
into a comparative and evaluative judgment on minority cultures (largely represented
by cultural defense cases) delivered from the point of view of Western liberal
cultures (represented by the eloquent testimony of academic feminists). In
my view, however, issues related to group rights or cultural defense must
be placed in the context of the ongoing lives of minorities in the metropolitan
cultures of the West if we are to understand the deprivation and discrimination
that shape their affective lives, often alienated from the comforts of citizenship.
Minorities are too frequently imaged as the abject "subjects" of their cultures
of origin huddled in the gazebo of group rights, preserving the orthodoxy
of their distinctive cultures in the midst of the great storm of Western progress.
When this becomes the dominant opinion within the liberal public sphere--strangely
similar to the views held by patriarchal elders within minority communities
whose authority depends upon just such traditionalist essentialisms and pieties--then
minorities are regarded as virtual citizens, never quite "here and now," relegated
to a distanced sense of belonging elsewhere, to a "there and then."

I do not wish to press the tired and overused charge of "Eurocentrism" against
such an argument. What is considerably more problematic than the inappropriate
application of "external" norms is the way in which the norms of Western liberalism
become at once the measure and mentor of minority cultures--Western liberalism,
warts and all, as a salvage operation, if not salvation itself. With a zealousness
not unlike the colonial civilizing mission, the "liberal" agenda is articulated
without a shadow of self-doubt, except perhaps to acknowledge its contingent
failings in the practice of everyday life. If the failures of liberalism are
always "practical," then what kind of perfectibility does the principle
claim for itself? Such a campaigning stance obscures indigenous traditions
of reform and resistance, ignores "local" leavenings of liberty, flies in
the face of feminist campaigns within nationalist and anti-colonial struggles,
leaves out well-established debates by minority intellectuals and activists
concerned with the difficult "translation" of gender and sexual politics in
the world of migration and resettlement.

Okin's concluding suggestion that "non-co-opted" younger women should be
represented in negotiations about group rights (so that they may be protected
from the more collusive, co-opted older women) smacks just a little of "divide
and rule." It may be useful to point out that for many post-colonial peoples,
who now count as the "minorities" of Western multiculturalism, liberalism
is not such a "foreign" value nor quite so simply a generational value. As
Kumkum Sangari puts it, "Existing exclusionary divisions of class, caste,
and gender in India interact with the hidden exclusions within `liberal' ideologies
to renew the force of ascription along lines of race and gender: in sum, with
liberalism's own difficulties in granting full citizenship to women." Asian
and Middle Eastern feminists, for instance, from the 1920s onward, have been
deeply engaged in those contradictions of the liberal tradition that become
particularly visible in the colonial and postcolonial contexts, and carry
over into the contemporary lives of diasporic or migratory communities. Such
an agonistic liberalism, with a colonial and post-colonial genealogy, has
to struggle against "indigenous" partiarchies--political and religious--while
strategically negotiating its own autonomy in relation to the paternalistic
liberalisms of colonial modernity or Westernization. An agonistic liberalism
questions the "foundationalist" claims of the metropolitan, "Western" liberal
tradition with as much persistence as it interrogates and resists the fundamentalisms
and ascriptions of indigenous orthodoxy. An awareness of the ambivalent and
"unsatisfied" histories of the liberal persuasion allows "us"--postcolonial
critics, multiculturalists, or feminists--to join in the unfinished work of
creating a more viable, intra-cultural community of rights.

Originally published in the October/ November
1997 issue of Boston Review

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